


Change Angels Into Devils

by hellgodsrus



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Character Study, F/F, F/M, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Immorality, Immortality, People's Tomb Fic Jam Prompt: Pride, Seven Deadly Sins, She is very old and very sad, The People's Tomb Discord, in both senses of the word
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:54:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26511001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellgodsrus/pseuds/hellgodsrus
Summary: Cytherea is very old, and has done so much, and is so very, very angry.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 35





	Change Angels Into Devils

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by the brilliant People's Tomb discord's first fic jam prompt; I'm not sure it's my best work, and Anna and I had some discussion about whether or not its interpretation of Cytherea was correct, but I hope you all enjoy it regardless. Thanks again go to Anna for betaing, and my beautiful fiancee (Taylor) and girlfriend (Jess).

Pride was the first thing she discarded. It wasn’t hard - she hadn’t had much pride Before. It was a hard thing to hold onto when her first attempt at smiling at someone she liked had instead led to her leaning forward and vomiting red and yellow. She’d had entire weeks where she’d feel her arms and legs get numb and have to collapse onto the nearest surface it was safe to sit on. So. Not having pride was something she was used to.

 _Having_ pride had been different. Not in herself, because she couldn’t, After. But in what she helped build, in the beautiful ornate edifice and bureaucracies, and the names she and the others had been given, in doing her best to live up to them.

That pride only lasted about three hundred years before it began to chafe. It seemed like no time at all now, but back then it had felt like so long, day after day heavy and ponderous and full of _doing_ and standing and dealing with the Resurrection Beasts and establishing obelisks and dealing with Ulysses apparently deciding that the response to all of this was to start having absolutely disgusting parties that showed he’d gotten rid of pride very quickly indeed.

 _Saint of Kindness_. She’d asked the Emperor why he’d chosen that name for her, aiming to pick a fight, and had been disarmed by his answer, the awkwardness with which he gave it.

As though what Loveday had done to her had been _kind_.

So, there went pride. She showed up to briefings in just her nightgown. She let Loveday’s rapier fall into _terrible_ repair for a while (until Number Five made that a very bad idea and an extremely cross Cassy kept doing horrible poking things to her soul and half pushing chunks of her into the River, until she gave in and got the fucking thing fixed). She loved the Emperor, but she avoided the kind of devotions and epithets she had used before, which put Mercymorn in an awful snit (but the woman was always in a snit about something). She even spent months, nearly a whole blessed year once, just lying in bed and _breathing_ , feeling the slow tingle of her body knitting the damage it did to itself back together.

Maybe that was a different kind of pride. She thought of it more as a sort of sloth. Indulging in her own immortality and relative untouchability.

That, too, got boring. She couldn’t say when, exactly. It was a bit slower of a process than the last round, which had definitively ended with that conversation with John. But it had started earlier, maybe? Memories became such messy, unordered things.

Odd, that such a short period of her life, the Before, had such an impact on her. But she’d thought, then, that she’d be lucky if she lived to thirty, that it would be a miracle if she reached forty, that it was literally impossible for her to live a mere _fifty_ years. Not even half a century she’d thought she’d had, and most of it spent in excruciating pain unable to do anything useful, so the time she’d _had_ she’d spent in a headlong dash, stuffing it full and beyond the brim. Some part of her was _still_ used to living like that, and so slowly she slipped out of the grip of sloth.

It was boringly predictable that she then collapsed straight into the other extreme, greedily cramming her days full of _stuff_. Sleep was a biological process and she learned to control it, cram it together into shorter and shorter periods of time, remove it entirely and run it in the background while doing something more _important_ , while doing three more important things. She found herself spending more and more time with Cassy, _learning_ , absorbing, helping her refine the obelisks and stele until she was almost certain they couldn’t be improved any further (some few thousand or so years later when some Sixth nobody _did_ improve the system she rewarded them with a quick, quiet death via River submersion, and it was only partly because watching other members of the Sixth grieve their loss was so funny).

Perhaps it was inevitable that she and Cassiopeia ended up having a _thing_. It wasn’t consistent, or concurrent - Cassy was too much of a bloodthirsty little weirdo with odd sexual habits - and a tendency to say ‘Nigella’ while they were fucking - for her to put up with her for more than a century or so at a time. But it was the closest thing she’d ever had to a relationship. She didn’t count the odd decade she spent with Mercymorn every few centuries because _really_ , it was only a few decades. Nor did she count the _well I’m immortal, so I might as well try it_ months or years with her brother-Lyctors - all of them except Augustine, because he was _such_ a wanker.

She found herself growing rather fond, in an odd way, of waking up from her ten minute power naps to find Cassy had never even bothered with that and was instead writing theorems on the walls, of coughing blood onto her piles of books and of listening to her absolutely lose her shit over it.

She supposed that covered lust too then. Not to the level of Ulysses, or the _awful_ paintings of Valancy that Cyrus’d hung up everywhere, but enough.

Somewhere along that line - which lasted several millennia, enough time to actually be relevant to think about - she became a generalist like Mercy was at the time. She had a rather embarrassing affinity for constructs which everyone found cute (apart from Cassy who just found it kind of pathetic, which was fair enough). They were useful for when her stupid body started to complain about the things she put it through, especially vis a vis sleep - good at catching her when she collapsed because her brain was too busy repairing the damage she’d done to it. She settled into a persona of a soft, kind touch with splinters and razors of wit underneath, and it didn’t hurt to hear the words _Saint of Kindness_.

She only had half a million brief nightmares about what she’d done to Loveday.

Then, when she was four thousand, three hundred and eighty six, Ulysses decided to grab Number Eight and jump off the top rope of the River with it straight into hell.

That made things different. Suddenly they’d all become preoccupied with, of all things, the _order_ in which they’d committed their crime and she became ‘our littlest Sister’. That sort of thing had always bothered Mercymorn but never the rest of them.

And as for Ulysses being gone… the Emperor was as sad as she’d ever seen him, so it was odd, how little she cared. Yes he was, had been one of the most important fixtures in her life but she didn’t really -

And everyone thought she did.

They looked at what she did and - and apparently they weren’t mocking her when they said she lived up to her title. Not even _Mercymorn_ was mocking her. She remembered that sick moment of realisation almost as well as she remembered what she’d done to Loveday.

She tried to explain it to Cassiopeia. And Cassy had just looked at her pityingly and said, “But you are. You are always there to help others, even with your… constructs. We say you’re kind because you _are_ , darling.”

That definitively ended that relationship.

She insisted on being called Cytherea Loveday, hoping that would remind them of what she was. Mercymorn raised an eyebrow and called her morbid, and Cyrus spent more time carefully avoiding all the paintings he’d placed around the Mithraeum, and that was it.

When they were surprised by Number Six and they were having to fight it for days on end, she dropped out of the River when she absolutely did not have to, leaving her family in a fucking awful position that led to Gideon and Cassy nearly dying, the Emperor merely pulled her to one side and told her it was fine to be tired of this awful, endless war, that if she wanted she could go into seclusion with him, the next time one of the Beasts appeared.

She took to tearing apart the hopes and dreams of Cohort officers reporting to the Emperor in her presence, and Augustine just _laughed_ and patted her on the back, told her that he thought she was _funny_.

She wanted to vomit her lung into his face for that, so she did, and somehow they all just found that _more_ funny.

(That was why she killed the Sixth, later - that same impulse. There was no way they could ignore her _murdering_ a leading researcher so fucking blatantly. Of course they, somehow, had. She’d wanted to grow bones like trees out of every last one of them)

The worst part was it was just her. Everyone knew Cassiopeia was a perfect little psychopath. Mercymorn and Augustine could never be in the same room without their gazes devolving to show the hatred they had for each other, for themselves, for what they’d done. Everyone looked at Cyrus’ pathetic pictures of him and Valancy and knew what a hideous _thing_ he was.

But not her. Not the ‘littlest Sister’.

Gideon was, almost, an exception. It would have been easy to say that wrath was _now_ , but in truth? Wrath was the five months after she found out he’d somehow kept Pyrrha alive inside him. A hundred and forty six days, eight hours that she had in perfect, frozen detail because _how, why, **how**_. They’d been _third_ \- and the order was suddenly _incredibly_ important now - they could have - they could have let her and Cyrus and idiot, dead Ulysses know - even now thinking about it she wanted to put her hands through his taut muscled ribcage and pulp the living mess of his organs with her bare hands, crush his bones with her screaming mouth.

Finally, Pyrrha had told her it was an accident. That Gideon didn’t even know -

She had bitten her own fingers off muffling her screams for years after that. To think all that time she’d spent getting it _perfect_ had been -

She couldn’t think about this right now.

Cyrus died. John called him a hero and one of the bravest men he’d ever known. She’d wanted to scream and rake her nails through his face - hard to do when they didn’t have his body because he’d dived into a fucking black hole, but in her fallible memory of afterwards she saw his body sitting in the chapel - and call him a disgusting pervert for leaving naked paintings of the woman he’d murdered all across their home.

Instead, she said something meek and pleasant. No wonder they didn’t know what she really was.

That was envy.

She went to the front, to fight. Mostly because she couldn’t stand being the Saint of Kindness anymore, but partly because Mercymorn’s plotting wasn’t subtle, and she didn’t know what to do about it.

It was worse there. Mortals just didn’t understand at all, but they kept brushing up against it - buzzing against her skin like insects drawn to the light. She met them, spoke with them, ate with them. Fucked them. Killed them. Not always in that order.

But they could be so incisive, she could see - pieces of people in them. Could have opportunities to get things she’d gotten wrong right with them.

Relationships with them didn’t count, but they counted more than anything she’d had with any Lyctor other than Cassy.

She worked out her _actual_ specialty there. She’d always had a horrible, awful knack for siphoning - Loveday had always had to talk her into using it, so gently, so softly. So moving from siphoning people to siphoning _planets_ , like she was a Resurrection Beast -

Well. She glutted herself on them, the way they’d fall dead, the weather stopping, the birds ceasing flight and crouching on the ground, huddled, as if they knew something terrible had happened. Was that gluttony? The whole seven sins thing the Emperor had mentioned once, so early on, seemed so stupid anyway. It would have to do, she supposed.

Number Seven killed Cassiopeia, tore her apart with frenzied ghosts over hours and hours and all she could think was _she gets to be with Nigella now; I hope she forgives her_. They didn’t even have the body for one of John’s horrid wakes. Gideon - or maybe Pyrrha - put his arm around her and she resisted the urge to bite it off.

There’d been a growing movement among her siblings to bother John about getting more of them. Lyctors, she meant. That holding the line with just four of them was impossible.

Some thousand years before today, she had seen him consider it for the first time.

That was also the day she’d decided to kill him.

The two incidents weren’t related. She felt like they should be but - no, they were separate, in her head. The decision came about because they were at some formal function, the sort she fucking _despised_ but would smile through nonetheless, wishing she still had the excuse to be able to cough blood in people’s faces or collapse on top of them and knock their food everywhere. She couldn’t say what the event was for, only that it was big - even Anastasia’s fascinating little cultists had sent three grim-faced figures to lurk in a corner and glare like they’d never heard of fun.

She didn’t know what house they’d been from. It didn’t really matter. But they’d been necromancer and cavalier, and the necromancer had stumbled on her stupid gown - or, no, she was mixing it up with a different event. This one, the necromancer had been unwell but had shown up anyway - had they been Seventh then? That didn’t feel right - and had clearly not been up for a massive party with the King Undying in attendance. And their cavalier had stood at their side, her eyes a perfect _fuck you, don’t get near her, don’t hurt her, don’t you_ dare - even managing it at Gideon and Mercymorn.

And it had struck her like being plunged into the River, deep at the base of her skull - Loveday doing the same for her when she arrived at Canaan House - and she thought again what she’d said, that first day After. _We had the choice to stop_.

Would those who ended up thinking they were serving their _God_ , to the Necrolord Prime, have that choice? Or would they think it was their sworn, religious duty? He could have _stopped_ it, the devotions, or relaxed them or - done _something_ so no-one else would have to choose anything other than _no, this is too high a price_ -

And they’d keep dying in his name, all the Lovedays, all the Nigellas and Samaels and Valancies and Alfreds and Pyrrhas and Cristabels and Titanias. He wore a crown made of the bones of _infants_ and she suddenly saw how fucking _perfect_ that was, that his rule was a rule of death far, far too early - and she knew what she would do.

Whenever he gave way. Whenever he decided that yes, he would force new people to make the _choice_ of Lyctorhood, she wouldn’t let it happen. She would go back home, and she would give them the mercy of fast, easy deaths on her monstrous hands. Her one true act of Kindness. She’d kill them all, every necromancer and cavalier before they could murder themselves in his name.

She’d find out more later. The ten billion, the rest of it, all the Blood of Eden spiel she barely cared about. But that was the core. Not one more Lyctor. _Not one more_.

Was that pride? It was. So much of what she’d done, in hindsight, was a kind of pride. Pride that in doing that she’d maybe, finally, live up to what people thought of her.

She was Cytherea the First, Seventh Saint to serve the King Undying. His Saint of Kindness, a necromancer and a cavalier. A monster couched in flesh. The vengeance of the ten billion, not that that mattered as much as being _Loveday’s_ vengeance. And she was _proud_ of what she would do.

**Author's Note:**

> Please do give comments, I live off of them like drawer bread.


End file.
